Li Zhensheng
[Photographer, b. 1940, Dalian, China, lives in Beijing.]
No one asked me to take close-ups of the bodies, but that’s what I did. I had to get very close, so close I could smell the fishy smell of blood and brains. (On his photographs of Red Guard executing prisoners in Harbin, China during the Cultural Revolution.) 
Piet Zwart
[Designer, photographer, and typographer, b. 1885, Zaandjik, Netherlands, d. 1977, Wassenaar, Netherlands.]
We used the camera only as a means of expression and as a visual medium that offers possibilities found in no other artistic technique, possibilities that the eye cannot catch in their totality. We tried to establish a characteristic vision of photography. Frank Zappa
[Musician and composer, b. 1940, Baltimore, Maryland, d. 1993, Los Angeles.]
And if another woman driverGets machine-gunned from her seat
They’ll send some joker with a brownie
And you’ll see it all complete.
Emile Zola
[Writer, b. 1840, Paris, France, d. 1902, Paris.]
In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it. Marius de Zayas
[Artist, b. 1880, Veracruz, Mexico, d. 1961, Greenwich, Connecticut.]
When man uses the camera without any final preconceived idea of final results, when he uses the camera as a means to penetrate the objective reality of facts, to acquire truth, when he tries to represent by itself and not by adapting it to any system of emotional representation, then, man is doing Photography.
(1913)